Re: Question about Data displayed by SQLplus

The existance of the :000 value was discovered by a user who was not getting the summary information he was expecting. He traced it down to one record and reported it. When we looked up the value in SQLPlus, it came out like this:

COLUMN_1 COLUMN_2 COLUMN_3 COLUMN_4 NUMERIC_VALUE 0 2334 124 12 :000

All columns are datatype numeric.

When we tryed searching for other records where numeric_value is = :000 SQLPlus informed us of our attempt to perform an illegal implicit conversion.
We were able to find other such values by searching for other records whose numeric_value was equal to the numeric_value of the above column. We deleted them by using the appropriate 'where' statements. It's happened a couple of times since then and we found the records in much the same way.
We tryed to insert a value of :000 we could not. So the question is:

What the hell is ":000" and what does it mean? I'm sorry if I don't seem very versed in the situation; Oracle is not my speciality. I would very much appreciate any information anyone can lend on the matter.
Please reply by email or post; just exclude the 'nospam' from the return address.

Martin Haltmayer wrote:
>
> How do you see the value being ":000"? When you do a SELECT within sqlplus? If
> so, what do you get when doing "SELECT dump (weird_column)"?
>
> Martin Haltmayer
>
> Gunner wrote:
> >
> > I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this and if anyone has
> > any idea of what this could mean:
> >
> > We have a process which calculates summary information and writes to a
> > certain table. One of the columns of this table is datatype numeric.
> > When we use sqlplus to querry this table, we'll occasionally find that
> > the value in the this column is :000
> > We have absolutely no idea how this value is getting into this column
> > (it is not within the scope of our application) and we've not been able
> > to manually insert a value like this.
> > Does anyone have any clue whatsoever what this value could indicate?
> > Please respond by email. Make sure to remove the 'nospam' from the
> > return address.
Received on Fri Mar 06 1998 - 00:00:00 CST